Powershell : Get example Sentence's for a Word using Web scraping on online dictionary

INTRODUCTION :

Everybody comes across a word that you don’t understand how to use it in a sentence, I face this often as I do ton of readings. normally I would have done a simple google search, let’s suppose for the word “Elixir”, which will give me few websites with sentence examples.

I would have opened one of these websites and got the example sentences, but I noticed some uniformity in data presentation and the URL on a website yourdictionary.com, upon inspecting the source code I easily traced out the HTML Tags in which data was enclosed.

Hence, I thought why not harvest this website’s data (Data Scraping) and get all sentences for a word.

HOW IT WORKS :

To implement this solution using Powershell, I identified the HTML Tag in which data was residing and its class (“Li_Content”) to filter exactly the sentences I want.

Once I had the sufficient information a simple Invoke-Webrequest to the site with my query word (“Elixir”) following the URL did most of the work

Invoke-WebRequest "http://sentence.yourdictionary.com/Elixir"

Then some data wrangling on the HTML tag and class to extract the sentences, which would look like in the following image

HOW TO USE IT :

Run the function ‘Get-Sentence‘ with your word and use -WordLimit parameter to control the length, or -Count parameter to number of sentences